AMD battles Barcelona delay rumours

'Intel killer' on schedule, AMD claims

Tom Sanders in California, vnunet.com 07 Jun 2007

AMD is denying reports that its highly anticipated Barcelona quad-core processor has been hit by a delay.

Barcelona is scheduled for release this summer and is still on track, AMD spokesman Andrew Fox told vnunet.com.

In the run-up to the launch, AMD is showing off the first working production chips at the Computex tradeshow in Taipei this week.

Supercomputer company Cray started raining on the chipmaker's parade with a warning on Monday that its upcoming XT4 supercomputer would be delayed because of production problems with Barcelona.

A story on the Dow Jones Newswire on Wednesday quoted Cray spokesman Steve Conway as saying that Barcelona was behind the delay.

Conway declined to comment to vnunet.com, but pointed to news reports that discredited his original quote.

Cray's XT4 will in fact be using Budapest, another quad-core AMD chip that has always been scheduled for a late 2007 release.

Budapest is aimed at low-cost single-socket servers for application in file servers, print servers and other less CPU-intensive tasks.

Also on Tuesday Citigroup analyst Glen Yeung said that he believed that Barcelona would be delayed. He based his findings on conversations with server vendors at the Computex tradeshow and pegged the new release date at September/October.

The two reports sent AMD stock down on Tuesday and Wednesday, as a delay would have a large impact on the chipmaker's profitability.

AMD has hyped Barcelona as the chip that will allow the company to take back the performance-per-watt lead from Intel. The metric indicates that the chip offers the best balance of power consumption and performance.

Barcelona is therefore considered a key weapon in AMD's continuing price war with Intel.